Workshop about the chapters How It Works and Into Action at the Spiritual Awakenings group in Bernardville, NJ

Failed to report certain things. Where was I self? Let's say I go up to my personal relationships. Where was I self seeking in my personal relationships? I was self seeking there because I did not inform my family that I was going to be cheating on my income tax for the next three years. Thank you. So be prepared to bail me out of jail.

My ambition? Where was I selfish? I was selfish with my ambition because by cheating on my income tax, yes, I have more money today,

but it's going to affect my happiness tomorrow. So it's going to affect, it's going to be selfish as it's as it relates to my ambition. I mean, you write down what comes, you know what I mean?

You don't have to fill out everything. I don't know anybody who it's, you're going to have 4 answers to every seven areas. You're really going to have to be stretching to find out where you were dishonest in your sex life as a, as a, as a, you know, with the IRS, unless you're sleeping with your IRS agent,

you know, I mean, so you're really, I'm not, I'm not expecting people to really stretch that way. But you write down what comes, and you write down honestly what's going on.

Well, the situation had not been entirely our fault. We tried to disregard the other person entirely. Where were we to blame? The inventory was ours, not the other man's. When we saw our faults, we listed them. We placed them before some black and white. That's why you know you need to write them.

We admitted our wrongs honestly and we're willing to set these matters straight. OK,

Does anyone have any questions on the inventory so far? We're going to stop tonight on the resentments next week we're going to do fierce and sex conduct. But does anyone want to want to ask any questions? And is there anything that's unclear? Did I miss it, anything? Did I not explain anything properly?

OK,

I'll have the tape for you, Pat.

Column one will be good for you, Column one will be good for it. But, but let me just say that the, the the freedom is in column four. I mean, we got to do one column one, two and three to get to column four. But column one, two and three basically is who are we mad at? Why are we mad and what did they threaten?

I mean, we can get that far a lot of times ourselves. We can get that far in our in our revenge fantasies.

The freedom is in column for where we find we search out what we did. How did we set ourselves up? What did we do to them before they did it to us?

What mistakes did we make? And we list them. That's where we find the freedom. Because I'll tell you if if all these people had to change that we're mad at for us to get free, we're in trouble because the IRS isn't changing. The VA isn't changing.

You know what I mean?

Your boss is not going to change. Your boss isn't going to say, Gee, thanks for all that helpful criticism today.

I'm going to be implementing that tomorrow. You know, the freedom is in us seeing how we screwed ourselves up because I'll tell you what, if it's our fault, we can get free of it if it's truly all these other sons of bitches who are in deep trouble. So the freedom that we're going to find in our resentment inventory is going to come from column four. Column four is where you going to find all the information that you're going to need for the fist step, the 6th step, the 7th step, the 8th step.

So an honest and accurate 4th column is going to mean a lot for you when you move into steps 5 through 9.

Can you give me an example of like the pre inventory express? You know where it says here? Where it says we have God to help our children,

that's when we're looking

before that safe, safe to start out.

You know, there's many, many different ways to go about it. But you, you ask for truth. You, you go God, I come to you making a decision that you are my father. I am your child. You are you are my director. I'm I'm your actor, you are my principal. I am your agent. I come to you knowing that self will has blocked me off from you. And that said that selfishness and self centeredness is the root of all my troubles and I come to you looking for you.

Help me find my truth about this.

Please help me find truth. I mean, that's just an example of I mean, you do it in your own words with, with your own, your own kind of attitude toward it. But you you ask God to help you find the truth.

Yeah. Is this something that you let's say what's separating something you share with your sponsor once again, or if you for your own personal guide, where do we hand it into you in the morning?

Basically what it's for is it's for you. It's an exercise for you to find truth. How I do fist steps with guys that I sponsor is I tell them to bring bring it with them and to read it. And I have them read it across,

have them read their resentments, why they have the resentment and go all the way across and read everything they found out. And I haven't go through the whole thing in a footstep with me.

Now,

I've found that that's a good way to do it. What the book says is the book says that having done our personal inventory, what are we going to do about it? We're going to, we're going to share this with God, ourselves and another human being. So that doesn't necessarily mean a sponsor can be a spiritual advisor, can be a priest. The book isn't specific about who it has to be. I will say, though, that it's a good idea to do it with someone who has experience with

4th and 1st step work because they'll be able to help you pick out patterns and stuff. If you do it with a priest.

They just sit there. Go ahead, go ahead. You know, they let you read the whole thing. They won't give you any feedback. You know they won't, they won't say, well, geez, I see a pattern there, you selfish bastard, Like a sponsored one. You know, the sponsor will help you pick out, Oh, you're, you're cheap and selfish. You know, you're, you're, you're tighter than the bark on a tree. That's basically what they found out about me, right? And, and those kind of things help.

So I don't know if that answers your question, but but you know, you're going to share that material, whether it's word for word, you're going to share that material in a footstep with another human being.

You feel it's more free to share with someone and go over it because they can point certain things out to you. Yeah, yeah. With a sponsor, spiritual advisors. Two things, though. Be careful where you leave it. I mean, if you put down criminal activity and stuff like that, be careful where you leave it.

Somebody my wife is working with just had her fist four step found by her husband and it had all her sexual harms on it. That created a bit of consternation, as you can well imagine. So be careful where you leave it and be careful who you choose for a fist step.

You got to know that it's in confidence. There are people around who if you confess a murder to them, they'll go. Well, it's, you know, now you've implicated me. I've got to go to the authorities. You know, you don't want, you don't want to be doing a fist up with somebody like that. That could cause you some grave harm. Anyway, anybody else?

Last week I passed around inventory worksheets. I'm going to pass them around again. If you still have yours from last week, please don't take one. There's not enough for everybody here, but hopefully there's enough for the people that didn't have one, you know, weren't here last week to get one.

I'll just pass those around.

A lot of times what I like to do is I like to read something

at the beginning of the meeting just to kind of get us going.

One of Doctor Bob and Bill Wilson's favorite writers from back in the 30s was a guy named Toyo Hiko Kagawa. He was a a Japanese spiritual writer and

in this book there's an explanation for how you're supposed to read spiritual classics. I can say I love the big book. Anybody that knows me knows I absolutely love this book. The more I go through it, the more I like it even more.

You know what I mean? The 75th time through it is better than the 74th. It's just an amazing text and it is absolutely a spiritual classic. And here's an explanation of how to read spiritual classics. It says in reading spiritual classics, though, we allow the text to master,

the We allow the text to master inform us. Such formative reading goes more slowly, more reflectively, allowing time for God to speak to us through the text.

I remember the first time I read the Big Book in rehab. I read it through like it was a novel. I was waiting to see what kind of an ending it had. This is not how you read the Big Book. God's word for us may come as easily from a minor point, or even an aside as from a major point. Formative reading requires that you approach the text in humility. Read as a secret, not an expert. Don't demand that the text meet your expectations for what an enlightened author should write.

Your first impression will probably be that Bill Wilson is not a great writer. That was my first impression.

That shouldn't have anything to do with it. Humility means accepting that the author, accepting the author as another imperfect human, a product of his or her own time and situation. And you'll find in the big book a lot of antiquated terminology, you know, like iron long terminology and things, you know, take that for what it is. It's a it's a product of its time and its environment.

Learn to celebrate what is foundational in an author's writing without being overly disturbed by what is peculiar to the author's Life and Times.

Trust the text is a gift from both God and the author, offered to you for your benefit. To help you grow. To read formatively, you must also slow down. Feel free to reread a passage that seems to speak especially to you. Stop from time to time to reflect on what you have been reading.

Keep a journal for those reflections. If you'll notice the books that we that we sell here

have for every page, it has a page for notes on OK. You're encouraged to write down leading thoughts or whatever is pertinent.

Keep your notebook open and your pencil in hand as you read. You might not get back to that wonderful insight later. Don't worry that you are not going through an entire passage or even the first paragraph. Formative reading is about depth rather than breadth, quality rather than quantity. As you read, seek God's direction for your own life.

Timeless truths have their place, but may not be what is most important for your own found formation here and now. Take care of That's right.

As you read the passage, you might keep some of these questions running through your mind.

How is what I'm reading true of my own life?

Where does it reflect my own experience? These are things that you can ask yourself about What about what you're reading? How does this text challenge me? What new direction does it offer me? What must I change to put what I am reading into practice? That's very important for this particular text.

There are things that we need to change to be able to recover from alcoholism, and this, the textbook, is basically a guide for how and what to change.

So we need to ask ourselves those self, those questions. How can I Incarnate it? Let this word become flesh in my life. You might also devote special attention to selections that upset you. There are going to be a few things in the big book that's going to upset you. There were for me. What is the source of the disturbance?

Do you want to argue theology? Are you turned off by cultural differences or have you been screw skewered by in the insight that would turn your life upside down if you took it seriously?

Like some of those things like pay the money back. You know that that's going to turn my life upside down. I'll tell you, you know, and that's disturbing at first sight, but we need to ask ourselves what it means to us and and how we can put it into practice in our life. Let your journal be a dialogue with the text.

Tonight we're going to start on page 67 on the bottom paragraph.

Last week we went over four column inventory, we went over resentment inventory and we found out that resentments are the number one killers of Alcoholics. So it's important that we

that we do the spiritual work to have them removed

to to have them mastered.

One of the things that you'll see in the inventory list is 1/4 column,

OK, It says the 4th column, again, like I said last week, is the key to the whole inventory process. It's our part in the deal. It's how we set ourselves up, what we did for the people to retaliate against us. You know, what exactly is what exactly did we do to set the ball rolling for us to have the resentment or have the people harm us to cause the resentment? And we have to ask ourselves very honestly, where were we? Selfish, dishonest, self seeking and frightened.

Now you're going to have a list of fears that come out of your resentment inventory. There's going to be a lot of them. I'll give you a couple from my last inventory. I'm afraid of looking bad. OK? God forbid. Chris Schroeder, Mr. A A looks bad. So. So another one was, I'm afraid that I'm going to lose things that I have because of a financial reversal.

Another fear is I won't be able to get what I want

because people, places, and things will be in my way. I'm afraid of being hurt. I'm afraid of being alone. I'm afraid of dying. I'm afraid of relationships. I'm afraid of not being in relationships. There's a lot of things that are going to come out of the 4th 4th column inventory that I need to address,

so I'm going to start on this paragraph. Notice the word fear is bracketed alongside the difficulties with Mr. Brown, Mrs. Jones, the employer, and the wife. The short word somehow touches about every aspect of our lives. It was an evil and corroding thread. The fabric of our existence was shot through with it. That is a powerful sentence. The fabric of my existence was shot through with fear to such an extent that it ruled my life. I'll give you an example.

I became very, very afraid of confrontation with people in my alcoholism. My lack of self esteem had gone to such a a low point that I was afraid to ask for raises. I was afraid to look for better jobs. I was afraid to ask women I was attracted to to go out with me. I was afraid to move. I was. I was afraid. I was afraid of a million things. And those fears kept me trapped

in bondage. They talk about the bondage to self. I was trapped in the bondage of self because of my fear.

Now, I didn't. I didn't look upon myself as a fearful person because I was the kind of guy, you give me a couple of whiskeys, I'd smash the biggest guy in a bar in the face. I raced motorcycles, I dove off cliffs. I did every kind of crazy thing you can imagine. So I was a very daring person.

So I didn't think that I had fear because I was daring. Now driving blackouts like constantly or you know, like like get get killed in drunken accidents, but

yet there was an there was a level of uncomfortability in my life that was just basically self-centered fear at depth. And it shot through my life and made it a living hell.

It's set in motion trains of circumstances which brought me misfortune that I felt that I didn't deserve

because I didn't look for a decent job.

I was working for a contractor who was a drunk himself, and he treated everybody like crap, you know what I mean? So I was being treated like crap. But looking at it in an inventory, wasn't it? Wasn't it really because of fear that I was trapped working for this jerk? You know, I could have got a better job, probably. I might not have been able to hold it drinking, but I probably could have moved,

it says. But did did not we ourselves set the ball rolling?

Sometimes we think fear ought to be classed with stealing. It seems to cause more trouble, and I've heard it mentioned. Why would they? Why would they compare fear with stealing? Those are two completely different things, one would think at first reading. But stealing is a conscious decision. Unless you're a freaking kleptomaniac. And they weren't writing this book for kleptomaniacs. They were writing it for Alcoholics.

An alcoholic that steals makes a conscious decision. I'm going to, I'm going to take a little bit of that guy's coke. He won't notice it a bit, you know, or, or you know, I'm at I'm out of money. I think I'll, you know, I'm going to go up to the liquor store and lift the a court of booze,

you know, I'll borrow money from so and so and conveniently forget to pay him back. I mean, whenever we stole, it was a conscious decision. So what about fear? Are they saying that fear is a conscious decision?

And let's just think about that and we'll get back to that later after we go through some more information,

instruction #1 everybody go to the fear list. And this is this is the fear list on the inventory,

OK. If we don't have enough sheets for everybody, basically you list the fear. There's a place here for fear and there's a place here for opposite fear. OK, Says we reviewed our fear thoroughly. We put them on paper even though we had no resentment in connection with them. All right, so

I fear losing my job. Now, there's a place over here for opposite fear

that just gives you an opportunity to look at the other side of the coin to see if you're also afraid of that. I'll give you an example. I'm afraid of losing my job. The opposite fear is I'm afraid of keeping my job. I'm afraid of being there forever. All right. I'm afraid of I'm afraid of getting into a relationship. I'm afraid of not getting into a relationship. I'm afraid of intimacy. I'm afraid of being alone. OK, those are those are just some examples of where you can find

opposite fear, but I found it in my personal experience, about 15% of the fears had an opposite that I that I found right away. Just gives you a chance to find the opposite.

We asked ourselves why we had them. That's that's column #2 why do I have the fear? And what you do is you ask yourself honestly, why do you have the fear? I'm afraid of the IRS. Why are you afraid of the IRS? Because they're going to audit me first, you know?

That's why

that's just. That's an easy example.

OK, so we asked ourselves why we had them. Why are we afraid after we get all that done? The best way to do these instructions is to not move on in the big book until you finish the instruction. So when it says we put them down on paper, put every fear you're consciously aware of from your 4th column inventory and then do a little bit of prayer work asking for anything that's not that doesn't have to do with Ruseva. I'll give you an example. There can be some fears like fear of snakes, fear of heights, fear of growing old.

Those can be fears that that don't have a resentment.

See some fears like fear of snakes, fear of heights, fear of growing old. Those can be fears that that don't have a resentment in in connection with them. You can then add them to the list.

Don't go any further in the book until you've done that to the best of your ability. Then go back and then it sells. Says we asked ourselves why we had them do column two to the absolute best of your ability before you go on. You know, this is how you go through the big book. It's a textbook. You follow directions as you go, just like you would in a calculus book. Like if you just glossed over the instructions in a calculus book and you got the chapter 5

and they asked you to do something, you'd have a hard time because you haven't done all the exercises going up to it.

So take the exercise and it says, wasn't it because self-reliance failed us?

Let's go back to the question that I asked earlier. Could fear be a conscious decision?

And I've come, I've come to the conclusion doing a lot of inventories that fear can be a conscious decision because we're relying on self and we're not relying on God. When we rely on God,

there should be No Fear, you know, if we have a healthy faith. Let me go on a little bit. self-reliance was good as far as it went, but it didn't go far enough. Some of us once had great self-confidence, but it didn't fully solve the fear problem or any other. When it made us cocky, it was worse. Perhaps there's a better way. We think so, for we're now on a different basis, the basis of trusting and relying upon God. Remember, we made it. We made a decision in the third step

to turn our will and our lives over or our actions and our thinking over to the care of God

as we understand him. That was a deal that he was going to be the father, we were going to be the son, He was going to be the principal, we were going to be the agent and he was going to be the director and we were going to be the actor. That was our third set decision. So we made that decision. So now we're on a on a basis of trusting and relying upon God. Hopefully, if we've taken the third step,

so now we're not relying on self as much as we're relying on God.

We trust infinite God rather than our finite selves. We're in the world to play the role He assigns just to the extent that we do is we think He would have us and humbly rely upon him. Does he enable us to match calamity with serenity? And there's an example of how we rely on God and how fear can be eliminated. It says here that if we do as we think God would have us do

and humbly rely upon Him, He enables us to match calamity with serenity.

There's not enough. There's not a lot of room for fear anymore. We begin to outgrow our fears. Fears are always around, but we we grow larger than fear, larger than the fears. With God's help,

we never apologized to anyone for depending upon our Creator. We can laugh at those who think spirituality the way of weakness. Paradoxically, it's the way of strength. The verdict of the ages is that faith means courage. All men of faith have courage. They trust their God. We never apologize for God. Instead, we let Him demonstrate through us what He can do. We ask Him to remove our fear and direct our attention to what He would have a space.

And once we commence the outgrow fear, let me go over the rest of this fear list for you. The Hit parade, it's named the hit parade here.

What you're able to do, you may not be able to do this at first, but what you're able to do after some experience writing fear inventory is you're able to break the fears down into common fears that it's called the hit parade column. In other words, you may come up with 20 things in your resentment inventory that make you look bad. You know, you don't have to write down make me look bad 20 times. You can just write it down once on your inventory, but

you'll find that making you look bad can be broken down with a lot of other fears into I'm afraid of being alone because if people think bad of me, they'll ignore me and I'll end up alone. The same thing with with

I'm afraid of not being in a relationship, you know, that can be broken down to all be alone that that'll be a common fear. So as you look over all these fears, you break them down into the common fears, usually end up with

anywhere from 5 to 20 common fears. And after you've got them all all the way broken down, what you do is you ask God to remove them. Says here, we we ask him to remove our fear and direct our attention to what he would have to speak. That's a prayer directive. That's the prayer work that we do after we're done with our fear column, then we're done at once. We commence to outgrow fear.

So anyone have any questions on the fear column?

OK, good. We get to do sex inventory now. I know that's the highlight for everybody here

now about sex. Many of us needed an overhauling there. I love that. And overhauling. It does not say many of us needed a tune up. It does not say many of us needed to change our attitude just a tad. It says that we need an overhauling as far as our our sexual life is concerned.

And I found that that's true. Haven't you, Chris?

He's not answering to protect the the innocent anyway. But above all, we tried to be sensible on this question. It's easy to get way off track

here. We find human opinions running to extremes, absurd extremes, perhaps. Remember, this book was written in the the, the late 30s. There was a lot of extremists back in those days. I'll tell you is for, you know, the sexual revolution had yet to take place.

One set of voices cry that sex is a lust of our lower nature of base necessity of procreation. And we have the voices that cry for sex and more sex, who bewail the institution of marriage, who think that most of the troubles of the race are traceable to sex causes. They think that we do not have enough of it or that isn't the right kind. You can if anybody that studied Freud understands what Bill Wilson was pointing out at here, he was pointing at some of Freud's absurdist beliefs. As far as, you know, our sexual nature and how it causes every,

we have think he was probably overstating things anyway.

They think that we do not have enough of it or that it isn't the right kind. They see its significance everywhere. One school would allow man no flavor for his fair and the other would have us all on a straight pepper diet. We want to stay out of this controversy. They're talking. They're really talking about

how we choose to express our sexuality, you know, how we choose to get into intimate relationships.

I think I become an ineffective sponsor when I try to,

I try to moralize. There are certain areas where I'm pretty inflexible, but there, you know,

it tells us, it tells us a little bit more here than we need to stay out of the controversy. We do not want to be the arbiters of anyone's sexual conduct. An arbitrator is a judge,

so sometimes that's hard to do, but I've learned to do it more and more in sobriety to just stay out of it. There are areas where I will judge the absolute shit out of you, and one of them is if you're running around with newcomers, OK, if you've got some time and you see, you see Missus Wonderful or even Mr. Wonderful walk into the rooms with like 3 days and you're all over that person,

I'll be all over you. But I'll tell you what, after 90 days or a year or something,

if you've got you, if you've had a chance to get on your feet a little bit, I'm going to stay out of, you know what I mean? I'm going to stay out of it. I have made the mistake of sticking my foot in other people's sexual conduct when it wasn't called for. And you, you want to, you want to become part of somebody's first column on their inventory real quick. You know that that's a good, that's a good way to do it, You know what I mean?

Anyway,

we we all have sex problems. We'd hardly be human if we didn't. What can we do about them? OK, we reviewed our conduct over the years past. So that's instruction #1 if you'll look at the sex inventory here,

it, it says review of relationship. This gives you, if you need any more space than this, put it on the back, you know, review the relationship. Mary Lou Mcgillicuddy and I met underneath the jungle gym in fifth grade. And our eyes met, you know, and, and we, we hooked up after recess. I mean,

whatever, whatever you got to put down, you know, like, like we met in rehab and instantly fell in love and divorced both of our spouses. And, you know, review the relationship, you know, write down some of the highlights, you know, what happened, what's going on, how it ended. You know, that's, that's an important part of the review. You know, she, she ran off with my sponsor,

whatever, whatever it is right at them. So that's instruction number one. Do that and then you move on

and it says where had we been selfish, dishonest, or inconsiderate? If you'll look on the list here, it says where had we been selfish, Where had we been dishonest? Where had we been inconsiderate? It does not say were we selfish, disaster and considerate. If we're alcoholic. We can answer those three questions. You know, you just have to be honest enough about it and you write that down. And I left enough room here for about 3 or 4 sentences. If you need more room, get another piece of paper.

So some of us, some of us deviance, need more room to to elaborate

anyway. Whom had we hurt? Who did we hurt?

We could have hurt ourselves. We could have hurt the person. We could have hurt the person's family. We could have hurt our wife or husband. Now we write down the people we had hurt and like I explained in the four column inventory last week where it asked us to write down where we've been selfish to self seeking or frightened to put in A at the end of the fourth column if it's going to call for an immense the same thing with the sexual harms. Who did we hurt? After each of the people we hurt,

we put an end. That does not mean that we rush out hell Mel making amends to everybody for our sexual conduct. That's a one area you can get in the biggest amount of trouble fast that there is. I believe that it it takes guidance with a spiritual advisor or sponsor before you make any sexual harms immense. You do not go up and knock on somebody's door and say, hey, can I talk to your wife? I got to discuss some sexual harms that that we had together about five years ago.

You know, I mean, there's just a million ways or you can go up to your wife and say,

honey, I slept with all four of the babysitters that we've had in the last year. I just had to get off my chest. Boy, do I feel better. You know, I mean, there's just there's a million things that you just cannot do. You'll cause more harm by doing so. And we're we're not we're not about making amends and causing more harms harm while we're doing that. That's not what we're about. OK, so who did we hurt? Put some as after that because

you're most likely going to, you're most likely going to owe an amend. Whether you do an amend or not is something that you're going to discuss with your sponsor or spiritual advisor

anyway. Did we unjustifiably arouse jealousy, suspicion or bitterness? And you know, down here, if it's a yes, you can, you can elaborate a little bit on how you did that.

Where were we at fault? What should we have done instead? And those are the two last sentences here. Where were we at fault?

Just give a brief description of how your, your selfish nature caused harm, you know, and, and, and how you were at fault. And I like what should we have done? It said it, it does not say. What could we have done instead, 'cause I'll tell you what, we were caught up in alcoholism. We were the raging tornado. We couldn't have done anything else. You know what I mean? We were, we were, we were in the bondage of self at that period of time and

most likely God wasn't even a factor in our lives.

So what should we have done instead? Is an ideal, you know, that helps us

shape a sane and sound ideal, which I'm going to get into in a minute.

So I probably shouldn't have gone underneath the jungle gym with Mary Lou Mcgillicuddy before she had 90 days, you know? I mean, whatever you have to write down about. What should you have done instead?

We got this all down on paper and we looked at it in this way. We tried to shape a sane and sound ideal for our future sex life.

To look at the last page here, I devote an entire page to what is known as sex ideal. What we do here is we do some prayer work, we do some review on all of our sexual harms, and we come to an understanding of what is comfortable for us and what isn't. If we're honest about ourselves, hurting other people in these defective relationships is not not what is making us happy.

We write down a sex ideal. Usually that's a couple of paragraphs long

and it's something like, I'll just give you a, for instance, I want to meet somebody with whom I'm spiritually well suited, someone who's doing the 12 step work, someone who I can, I can grow with through the years, Someone who's strong points overcome my weak points, someone who's caring and loving that I have a good sexual relationship with. You know, I mean, write down your sex ideal and I'm going to give away, I'm going to give away a secret here.

Anybody that does this work, that's put down a sexual ideal, anybody that follows through with the amends and working with others and they continue to practice these principles and all their affairs. Guess what? You're going to end up with your sex ideal. One day you'll pull this out of the drawing and go, holy mackerel, I have this. You may have to divorce the numbskull that you're with right now to get it,

but I will. I will tell you

that it's, it's going to, it's going to happen. It's going to happen in your life, you know. I'm just kidding, by the way.

Anyway, we were supposed to work toward this ideal, you know, not not hunt for it. Anyway,

we we subjected each relation to this test. Was it selfish or not? We asked God to mold our ideals and help us to live up to them. There's another prayer directive. After we're done with our sex ideal, we ask God to help us achieve it.

We remembered always that our sex powers were God-given and therefore good, neither to be used lightly or selfishly, nor to be despot spies. Their love. I'll give you an example of that sentence. I believe that God gave us our sexual drive, and I believe he gave it to us for a purpose, and that that purpose is the the continuation of our species. OK, so, so he gave it. He gave us the sexual instinct and he made it fun so that we would do it. OK, so in my opinion at least,

there's two good, very good reasons to have sex. One of them is to have children and, you know, have a family and keep the race going. And the other is because it's fun. All right. But the problem is the problem is this is very easily easy for this instinct to harm others, you know, And so we got to be very, very careful about that. But we, you know, we're not talking about, you know, should you have sex before marriage or any of that nonsense. We stay out of that controversy as far as this inventory is concerned.

I'm not interested in hearing a footstep where, where somebody's admitting to having, you know, unmarried sex. You know, I can care less about that. You know, talk to me about the harms, you know, because that's, that's what the problem is. It's, you know, not the good stuff. The good stuff is good. You don't need to worry about that. But the problem is, it's most Alcoholics have such defective sexual relationships that almost everything turns into a a nightmare.

You know what I mean,

You know, just being honest here. Anyway, whatever our ideal turns out to be, we must be willing to grow toward it. We must be willing to make amends where we have done harm. That's what the little A is for, provided that we do not bring bring about still more harm in so doing. In other words, we treat sex as we would any other problem. Here's here's a meditation instruction. In meditation, we ask God what we should do about each specific matter. The right answer will come if we want it.

So he's talking about possible, immense God alone can judge our sex situation. Counsel with other persons is often desirable, but we let God be the final judge. We realize that some people are as fanatical about sex as others are loose. We avoid hysterical thinking or advice. So council with others is advisable. But that little conscience that we have inside of us, that little, that little thing that says what's right and what's wrong is what we're supposed to listen to. We're supposed to listen to the God inside.

Suppose we, I I want everybody to pay attention to this next paragraph.

I've seen this paragraph take out more people that we're going to get drunk. Some people tell us so, but this is only a half truth. It depends on us and on our motives. In other words, if we allow our sexual conduct to to remain the way it is, you know, and run after every newcomer in the rooms or or selfishly have sex where it harms others, you know, lie to get it, cheat, steal, whatever. If we continue to do this, it says if we're sorry for what we have done and have an honest,

let God take us to better things, we believe we will be forgiven and we'll have learned our lesson. In other words, if we're repentant about it, if we're willing to change, we'll be forgiven. OK. If, if we are not sorry for our and our conduct continues to harm others, we are quite sure to drink. It only tells us about three times in this book that we're quite sure to drink. And this is one. And I'll tell you what, I have seen this happen so often. It is scary. You know, it is scary.

We are not theorizing. These are facts out of our experience.

To sum up about sex. We earnestly pray for the right ideal, for guidance in each questionable situation, for sanity and the strength to do the right thing. They're given that prayer directive again, if sex is very troublesome, we throw ourselves the harder into helping others. We think of their needs and work for them. This takes us out of ourselves and it quiets the newcomers horny urge when the yield would mean heartache. So if you're having trouble.

With, with sexual relations, go to Honesty House on Thursday night and carry the message.

You know,

I mean, work with grabbing newcomer. If you're not, if you're not really up to sponsoring somebody, carry them to the message. There's a million people without driver's licenses around here. Drive them all around, get involved, get active. You know, that's what you're supposed to do. If we have been thorough about our personal inventory and have written down a lot, we have listed and analyzed our resentments. We've begun to comprehend their futility and their fatality. If you've done the inventory right,

the 6th step is a no brainer,

you know, become willing to have these things removed. It's like another OK, If you've done a good inventory, you know, there's no, no worrying about whether you're willing or not. It's, it's all in black and white. I've screwed my life up and it's all my fault. You know what I mean? We have commenced to see their terrible destructiveness. We've begun to learn tolerance, patience, and goodwill toward all men, even our enemies, for we look upon them as sick people.

These are some of the promises we have listed the people we have hurt by our conduct and we are willing to straighten out the past if we can.